Amor Omnibus Idem
by The Lark Ascending
Summary: Guinevere, half unwittingly, reinvents the fate of Britain: a story of Shalott, in which the doom of the Lady Elaine is shared by another.


_There she weaves by night and day  
A magic web with colours gay.  
She has heard a whisper say,  
A curse is on her if she stay  
To look down to Camelot.  
She knows not what the curse may be,  
And so she weaveth steadily,  
And little other care hath she,  
The Lady of Shalott._

_&_

"I am sure legends will never match the truth of our glory, nor of our doom. Yet legends there will be; 'tis most certain. How will they tell of us, I wonder? Of the King, of his Knights and Ladies - of our fair Britain? I would fain see no man's hand guide the telling of this delicate history, for I fear his partiality."

From her window the Queen of Camelot surveyed the burgeoning springtime land round her fortress. By her side was a great loom, threaded with dyed fabric whereof a richly hued cloak had been partly woven. The voluminous folds of the cloak were spread on a stool as if in display, reflected in a long and rectangular mirror that hung upon the opposing partition of the royal bedchamber.

Guinevere turned from the window and her gaze lit on the bright colours of the cloak. A wistful smile graced the sharp angles of her face, softening her countenance: the Queen was ever a sprite-like creature, more fairy than wench, her husband's men were wont to say; but she was of that old metal, from which the human frame was wrought when folk were yet as one with the earth, and her build was that of the lupine huntress, tall and spare and otherwise nondescript.

"She bides here and keens for him," murmured the Queen, seeming to see a vision before her at the loom, "such as I shall never do for Arthur."

Moving to stand in place of the imaginary weaver, Guinevere rested merely the tips of her spider-thin fingers on the weaver's stone sill. She looked out on a patchwork of undulating hills streaked brownish green with silt and bracken, which all ran down in thick, clotted troughs and rivulets to the great river.

"At such a regal hour the sun is like a warm yellow yolk and the moon but a trace of a shadow in a cold blue sky. Presently he rides hence, and her loom quickens."

The Queen wore a frock of animal hide trimmed with ermine, though likely the sumptuous cloak were better fit to one of her station. Her sleeves were long and wide according to the fashion of the Romano-British court, but she had bunched them up above her elbows: it seemed she had lately been soaking her forearms in some herbal solution, for they were moist and flecked with pieces and bits of aromatic leaves.

"First she doubts herself. Then she recalls one moment, sudden as the prick of a briar thorn, when she was entirely sure - and ah, the excruciating sweetness! She is heady with pleasure," Guinevere mused aloud in a voice low and mellifluous like the whippoorwill in the fields at nightfall. "Then the colour deepens in her bosom and she is ashamed. In her mind she dwells on each word that has passed her lips while in his presence, every syllable her lips have formed. When the occasion arises for them to meet in court, long afterwards she recalls their meetings with exaggerated clarity, save for those times - only sometimes, when she is faint with hunger of a desperate, starved quality - when all she sees is his face, his lips and eyes; and all she hears is the throbbing of her own heart in her breast, like that of a young thrush caught in a cat's claw, frenzied and full-swole."

Guinevere's breath quickened and over her high cheekbones thin strips of colour appeared, like fine brushstrokes of apricot. Her eyes were grey and lucid, but as her fingers curled into the cold stone her irises betrayed inner disquiet.

"And what of him? With what secret turmoil does he contend? None! Or only that of his own vanity." Guinevere whirled from the window and crossed the chamber in a few long strides. "To choose one's fate is hardly to resign oneself to the same," she whispered tremulously through clenched teeth, upon her face a terrible expression of fierce yet anguished determination.

She stood before the mirror only a moment, in which the many colours of the cloak loomed before her like a lurid painting. Thereupon was depicted a superimposed image of Camelot gruesomely distorted. Then she lifted her left arm high above her head, and brought it down to smite the glass with a white, bare, trembling hand.

In a moment the Queen's retinue was at her side. Scores of Knights, Pages and Ladies found her unharmed, though looking as if she had run a great distance at mortal peril. She stood straight-backed like a brittle trunk of silver birch against a fierce wind, quivering in every limb.

Shards of crystal blanketed the floor and glimmered blue in the gathering twilight. Outside, cheerful notes rang in the air as sundry loyal subjects of Camelot returned from market and from the fields. Brazen tavern wenches, simple reapers, courtly minstrels and pious priests mingled their voices in song as they trod the muddy paths.

"Elaine," said Guinevere to a shy maid who stood partly veiled in shadow, "tryst with me a while here." The others she dismissed quickly and with severity, once all the shattered glass was swept away.

Elaine came forth, a girl slight but well formed and womanly; light of hair and eye; fair of skin if not pale from dearth of sunlight. She wore white linen all, but about her waist was fastened a strip of tanned leather. Her aspect was grave but not cold, her smile unpractised but not unwilling; and as she stood with the Queen at the casement, galloping horse-hooves echoed on the tower walls from the road below.

"Tirra lirra," sang out heartily one bold voice, and another answered with affection,

"Too easily do you take life, my dear Lancelot, and this, our return home. Does nothing inspire your reverence, or move you to sombre reflection?"

The two women took sharp, shallow breath together, at which coincidence Elaine dropped her gaze to the floor in shame.

"You shall not weave here any longer," decreed the Queen. "Now lift your head and kiss my hand, and perchance you will grow stronger."

From below, Lancelot said, "Beside the unnecessary loss of an able-bodied Knight, little else worries my sleep. Ah, but how could I leave out - a fair and virtuous damsel at great peril bodes well for a terrible fight."

The sound of the good Knight's merry laughter and the King's answering chuckle, part admiration and part dismay, followed after them as they went, bouncing between the battlements till the noises of their mirth rose up to Guinevere's window as teasing fairy voices. Her large grey eyes grew fearful.

"Oh Goddess, oh Merlin!" her lips formed a circle as if to cry out, but she whispered rather, as if her breath was stolen suddenly. "I know what I have done, and I see what I am here for."

Elaine took the Queen's spice-scented hand, and clasped those slim olive-toned fingers in her own plump, white appendages. Tenderly she kissed the palm of Guinevere, and looked into her eyes with a guileless deep blue gaze.

"Dare I be so bold, your Highness, as to beseech you not to brood, for the King has returned at the appointed hour, and surely will hie himself hence from court to attend his Queen."

Guinevere sighed, an expression that was used to issue from one of her gritty composition rarely, and put her hand to her head in a fretful gesture. The alarm of her good lady Elaine was displayed without check, whose eyes wandered at last to the bare wall where the glass had hung, wherefore her delicate frame started all a-tremble.

"If I am no more to weave, what employ shall be mine? If I am no more to gaze into the mirror, what shall consume my waking hours? Bereft of those coveted glimpses of Camelot I know not but that my poorly flesh will waste to nothing."

"You know not of what you speak, " Guinevere rejoined in a voice that had somewhat regained its full-bodied reverb, though she sat down heavily on a stool close at hand. "Rather you shall bide at court all your days now, and ride out with your entourage to the jousting parties, and hie you to market also when it may strike your fancy, since my other ladies are never so timid as to refrain from doing so."

The Queen's commanding words stayed her lady's trembling. Elaine peered beyond the casement to the outside world: when the sun's last rays crossed the length of the great river and spilled their warmth on the eastern slopes like slick golden honey, life seemed to be newborn in her flesh; bathed in light, her white face was more radiant than pale; her bosom swelled and her back straightened; her chin she held loftily as befitted a lady of the Queen's retinue.

Guinevere smoothed her sleeves down over her forearms, whereupon gooseflesh had arisen, and drew the folds of her frock close about her spare frame. It might have been said she had shrunk against the outer partition, whence her skin felt the cold stone even through her course clothing and she shivered violently. Guinevere was not used to feel the creeping cold of Camelot as others did.

A page entered the room, his shorn flaxen hair a-gleam in a shaft of fading sunlight. "The King sends word from court that his approach is nigh, your Highness, that you may be ready to receive him at your pleasure."

"Ah, good page, before you depart - escort my lady Elaine to her chambers, and with you take this tapestry, that her serving wenches may launder its fine fabric from this decanter, and clothe her in its comfort when she sleeps."

To the page boy Guinevere gave first the motley cloak, then a crystal decanter filled with an indiscernible liquid tinted gold like rich oil.

"Are not these four walls very close, Elaine?" the Queen inquired.

"All the world seems vast to me this night, your Highness," replied Elaine, coming away from the window. "Yet I fail entirely in the expression of my gratitude for your unfounded favour."

"Speak neither of favour nor of aught unfounded: forsooth nothing is so. The tapestry is your work, albeit your last, and with you it shall go always. Nor shall you treat it carelessly, but guard it with secrecy, till the end of your days."

A silent question formed on the lips of Elaine, but since the cry of page boys and the laughter of Knights heralded the arrival of the King, she curtseyed deeply and was gone.

Arthur the High King of Britain came upon his Queen suddenly and unattended. Though he had girded his saddle-worn loins with fresh cloth, and wore a long tunic of lambskin, he had not yet bathed; but Guinevere perceived he had been to chapel, and there had dipped his hands in the holy water. Smudges of dirt further darkened his swarthy brow, as if while kneeling to pray at the altar he had covered his face with his dripping hands. He smelled thickly of myrrh and gum benjamin, pellets of which were kept burning always by the priests in the chapel.

"What is this, my own Gwen? I had left a druidess, and have found but a woman."

"I had not known the two were dislike till now."

"I see you have not relinquished your traditional ways: the mirror is gone, the lady Elaine is moved, and your hand is not bloodied but perfumed, rather, in some strong herbal fragrance I remember from our first meeting. It covered your body, every limb and appendage; I sought it in every soft cranny, each tender nook."

His scarred and callused hand now sought her scalp, burrowing in her hair. With a harsh, dry sob, Guinevere clasped her arms about his waist and begged him to take her up.

"My desire exceeds my astonishment," said Arthur wonderingly in lifting her to his chest, whereupon he carried her swiftly to her own mattress, there to bed her.

As he descended upon her, the demands of his body were arrested by her tears, which flowed bitterly and long o'er cheeks a-flame. He paused in his primal quest to speak to his Queen, this young, weak, trembling, impassioned woman, this sometime-fairy, this priestess of Britain.

"What troubles the heart of a warrior, my own Gwen?" he said, and stroked her hair. He remained close to her so that she might feel the compelling heat emanating from him, but too far from her to unite them of his own volition.

"It is just this, Arthur," said Guinevere. "I thought to save Elaine from the ruin of her own covetous heart; from the bitter fate of loving too well one man. Only it appeared to me that she was weak, and I strong. Now I see that she and I are as one. I am but a woman, though a Queen; you are but a man, though a King, and in her stead I shall die for love of you. Lancelot is but a Knight, though a man; and Elaine will have his colours and his heart."

"To be sure, this is strange magic," murmured the King, and in that twilight hour the tears of Guinevere were spent, and their passion expended.

_&_

_But in her web she still delights  
To weave the mirror's magic sights,   
For often through the silent nights  
A funeral, with plumes and lights  
And music, went to Camelot;  
Or when the Moon was overhead,  
Came two young lovers lately wed.  
"I am half sick of shadows," said  
The Lady of Shalott_


End file.
